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(from a longer piece that appeared in Geist 57 in the summer of 2005 ) . . . . Some years later, and many years ago, in 1971, when I went to Dollarton to have a look at Malcolm Lowry country, a couple of hundred squatters in Vancouver were living in a shantytown at the […]

This year the mavens of As It Happens on CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day on the 22nd of March (the second day of spring) by reading aloud a “poem about spring” written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, the poetaster whose not nearly-enough-forgotten oeuvre has been the bane of five generations of schoolchildren. I happened […]

Approaching Toronto on the last day of October. In a new city, everyone you meet partakes of this quality of the denizen, of the holder of a secret: they deport themselves “naturally” without apparent self-consciousness, crossing streets and walking along sidewalks, rather as children in Quebec are able (miraculously) to speak French without having to think about it.

Twenty-nine years ago in Fanuj in south­ern Iran, Mehrab Arbab, a high school teacher who today oper­ates the Mr. Tube Steak hot dog stand at the Broadway SkyTrain sta­tion in Vancouver, escaped from the Revolutionary Guard of Ayatollah Khomeini, when they took twenty-six teach­ers from the school at which Mehrab Arbab taught English, his­tory and geog­ra­phy, […]

I have started a new blog over at blogger.com devoted the question of what constitutes a cultural magazine. Many arts and literary publishers are struggling to adopt or adapt to the standard magazine publishing models as exhibited by entertainment, news and lifestyle publications that thrive in a world of periodicity and renewal (ie: a consumer […]

Today is the birthday of my friend Sherie Kaplan who died earlier this year, so this is the first time that she and I are not exchanging emails and phone calls in order to arrange a birthday dinner. Instead, I have resolved on my own to start this blog again. Sherie and I were born […]

3 of 3 posts in 1-Minute Movies On the second day at Banff, 20 Feb 2010, the In(ter)ventionists took a moment out of their deliberations to stand in the sunlight. This one-minute movie is sharper than the others on this blog, so maybe I’m getting it!

Launch day: Banff Centre. The first entry in this blog, which goes public today, during the lunch break at the in(ter)ventions conference (parentheses supplied by the Banff Centre), was written on the 24th of January; several entries have been added since then during a month of tweaking and trying to understand the process of writing […]

2 of 5 posts in 3-Cent MagazineBy our own calculations we had in the course of seven years spent $65,000 in the Marble Arch beer parlour, the equivalent of 130,000 glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the magazine, half a million pages of literary writing, we had perfected the […]